West Antarctica warming fast, may quicken sea level rise: study

This handout satellite image from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft shows the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica November 13, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team/Handout

By Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle

OSLO | Mon Dec 24, 2012 1:56pm EST

OSLO (Reuters) - West Antarctica is warming almost twice as fast as previously believed, adding to worries of a thaw that would add to sea level rise from San Francisco to Shanghai, a study showed on Sunday.

Annual average temperatures at the Byrd research station in West Antarctica had risen 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3F) since the 1950s, one of the fastest gains on the planet and three times the global average in a changing climate, it said.

The unexpectedly big increase adds to fears the ice sheet is vulnerable to thawing. West Antarctica holds enough ice to raise world sea levels by at least 3.3 meters (11 feet) if it ever all melted, a process that would take centuries.

"The western part of the ice sheet is experiencing nearly twice as much warming as previously thought," Ohio State University said in a statement of the study led by its geography professor David Bromwich.

The warming "raises further concerns about the future contribution of Antarctica to sea level rise," it said. Higher summer temperatures raised risks of a surface melt of ice and snow even though most of Antarctica is in a year-round deep freeze.

Low-lying nations from Bangladesh to Tuvalu are especially vulnerable to sea level rise, as are coastal cities from London to Buenos Aires. Sea levels have risen by about 20 cms (8 inches) in the past century.

The United Nations panel of climate experts projects that sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 cms (7-24 inches) this century, and by more if a thaw of Greenland and Antarctica accelerates, due to global warming caused by human activities.

GLACIERS

The rise in temperatures in the remote region was comparable to that on the Antarctic Peninsula to the north, which snakes up towards South America, according to the U.S.-based experts writing in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Parts of the northern hemisphere have also warmed at similarly fast rates.

Several ice shelves - thick ice floating on the ocean and linked to land - have collapsed around the Antarctic Peninsula in recent years. Once ice shelves break up, glaciers pent up behind them can slide faster into the sea, raising water levels.

"The stakes would be much higher if a similar event occurred to an ice shelf restraining one of the enormous West Antarctic ice sheet glaciers," said Andrew Monaghan, a co-author at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The Pine Island glacier off West Antarctica, for instance, brings as much water to the ocean as the Rhine river in Europe.

The scientists said there had been one instance of a widespread surface melt of West Antarctica, in 2005. "A continued rise in summer temperatures could lead to more frequent and extensive episodes of surface melting," they wrote.

West Antarctica now contributes about 0.3 mm a year to sea level rise, less than Greenland's 0.7 mm, Ohio State University said. The bigger East Antarctic ice sheet is less vulnerable to a thaw.

Helped by computer simulations, the scientists reconstructed a record of temperatures stretching back to 1958 at Byrd, where about a third of the measurements were missing, sometimes because of power failures in the long Antarctic winters.

(Reporting By Alister Doyle; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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US issues framework on study on fracking and water

A natural gas well is drilled near Canton, in Bradford County, Pennsylvania January 8, 2012. Bradford County is currently ground zero for fracking the Marcellus shale in the Northeastern United States.

Credit: Reuters/Les Stone

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON | Fri Dec 21, 2012 1:57pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration issued the framework on Friday of a long-term study on whether fracking for natural gas pollutes drinking water, but will not make conclusions until 2014 about the controversial technique that is helping to fuel a domestic drilling boom.

Critics of the Environmental Protection Agency study, called for by Congress in 2010, complain it does not closely examine the impact of drillers' injecting waste water deep underground, a practice that has been linked to small earthquakes.

The progress report outlined case studies at drilling sites in states including North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas that will inform the final study. For a link to the study click here r.reuters.com/jec84t

It also explained the scientific methods the EPA is using to understand how drinking water supplies are affected by the lifecycle of water used fracking. That cycle ranges from withdrawing the water from ground and surface supplies to treating it in wastewater plants.

Although conclusions are more than a year away, power utilities, chemical companies and other big consumers of natural gas fear the study could lead to more regulations and raise costs as a result. Power generators, including American Electric Power and Southern Co, have been enjoying rock bottom prices for natural gas in recent years.

Fracking involves forcing large volumes of water laced with chemicals and sand deep underground to crack rock and free oil and natural gas. Critics of fracking, including many environmentalists, worry drilling operations near schools and homes can pollute water and air.

The drilling industry and some Republicans in Congress have said the EPA study is overkill because fracking is safe.

The EPA's long-term study will examine the large volumes of water sucked up by fracking operations, surface spills of fracking fluids on well pads, and the drilling itself.

The study will also look at spills of so-called "flowback" water that rushes up from wells when they start producing gas, and how well wastewater treatment plants operate.

But the study does not closely look at the effects of injecting waste water deep underground, a practice environmentalists worry could become a dormant threat to water supplies.

Drillers say they are recycling more and more water used and produced in fracking. But some of the waste is still injected underground.

Ben Grumbles, a former assistant administrator for water at the EPA, said injection of the waste is "legitimate and important concern."

Ohio recently linked the disposal method to a series of small earthquakes and placed a moratorium on the injections but lifted it in November.

Grumbles, who is now president of the U.S. Water Alliance, said the omission of examining the practice was "not a fatal flaw" of the study because he believes a different arm of the EPA is doing research on waste water injection.

"They really do need to look at the issue," he said. "I would hope the offices were coordinating and efforts to review potential risks of large volumes of waste water being injected ... will be looked at, " he said.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Sofina Mirza-Reid)

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"Peak farmland" is here, crop area to diminish: study

Combines harvest wheat on the Stephen and Brian Vandervalk farm near Fort MacLeod,, Alberta, September 26, 2011.

Credit: Reuters/Todd Korol

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO | Mon Dec 17, 2012 5:05pm EST

OSLO (Reuters) - The amount of land needed to grow crops worldwide is at a peak, and a geographical area more than twice the size of France will be able to return to its natural state by 2060 as a result of rising yields and slower population growth, a group of experts said on Monday.

Their report, conflicting with United Nations studies that say more cropland will be needed in coming decades to avert hunger and price spikes as the world population rises above 7 billion, said humanity had reached what it called "Peak Farmland".

More crops for use as biofuels and increased meat consumption in emerging economies such as China and India, demanding more cropland to feed livestock, would not offset a fall from the peak driven by improved yields, it calculated.

If the report is accurate, the land freed up from crop farming would be some 10 percent of what is currently in use - equivalent to 2.5 times the size of France, Europe's biggest country bar Russia, or more than all the arable land now utilized in China.

"We believe that humanity has reached Peak Farmland, and that a large net global restoration of land to nature is ready to begin," said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at the Rockefeller University in New York.

"Happily, the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but rather moderation of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers," he wrote in a speech about the study he led in the journal Population and Development Review.

The report, supplied to Reuters by Ausubel, projected that almost 150 million hectares (370 million acres) could be restored to natural conditions such as forest by 2060. That is also equivalent to 1.5 times the area of Egypt or 10 times the size of Iowa.

It said the global arable land and permanent crop areas rose from 1.37 billion hectares (3.38 billion acres) in 1961 to 1.53 billion (3.78 billion acres) in 2009. It projected a fall to 1.38 billion hectares (3.41 billion acres) in 2060.

Gary Blumenthal, head of Washington-based agricultural consultancy World Perspectives, said the report's conclusions were not surprising as technology already exists to dramatically boost crop production. But achieving "peak farmland" would depend on the technology being made available globally, he added.

"If we could just get yields in the rest of the world at levels that they are in the U.S. or Europe, we would have substantially more food," Blumenthal said. "Just using existing farmland more efficiently, would substantially increase supplies. Yields are rising."

LAND MORE SCARCE

A June 2012 report by the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), however, said that an extra net 70 million hectares of land worldwide would have to be cultivated in 2050, compared with now: "Land and water resources are now much more stressed than in the past and are becoming scarcer," it said, referring to factors such as soil degradation and salinisation.

Ausubel's study admits to making many assumptions - rising crop yields, slowing population growth, a relatively slow rise in the use of crops to produce biofuels, moderate rises in meat consumption - that could all skew the outcome, if not accurate.

It also does not factor in any disruptions from significant climate change that U.N. studies say could affect farm output with rising temperatures, less predictable rainfall, more floods or droughts, desertification and heatwaves.

Still, it points out that both China and India have already spared vast tracts of land in recent decades.

In India, for instance, wheat farmers would now be using an extra 65 million hectares - an area the size of France - if yields had stagnated at 1961 levels. China had similarly spared 120 million hectares by the same benchmark.

The authors said that the idea of "Peak Farmland" was borrowed from the phrase "Peak Oil", the possibility that world use of petroleum is at its maximum.

The study also projected that world corn yields would rise at an annual rate of 1.7 percent until 2060, against a 1.8 percent annual gain from 1983 to 2011. By 2060, that would raise world corn yields to roughly the current U.S. average, it said.

It said that biofuels were a wild card in calculations. The study concluded that non-food crop production - for instance not just sugar or corn used as fuel but also the likes of cotton and tobacco - was likely to exceed growth in food supply until 2060.

Growth of all crops would outstrip food supply by 0.4 percent a year until 2060, up from 0.24 percent a year from 1961 to 2010, it projected. That indicated a continual, but not spectacular, rise for biofuels.

Changing diet was also a big uncertainty as the world population headed toward about 10 billion and simultaneously grappled with problems of obesity and malnourishment. But there were some encouraging signs, the report found.

Meat consumption in China was rising only moderately, far below rates of economic growth. "Fortunately for the sparing of cropland," it said of world trends, "Meat consumption is rising only half as fast as affluence."

(Reporting By Alister Doyle; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Gunna Dickson)

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